These portable computers that resemble portable desktop replacements are classified under the portable workstation category, being equipped with workstation-class hardware and features that make them great companions of engineers, architects, or scientists on field-work that need abundant computing power that's also portable. Lenovo released the W700 and W500 earlier this month. They are taking orders.

The W700 is the flagship part, and comes in various hardware configurations. Lenovo targets the Oil/Natural Gas, CAD/CAM/EDA, DCC/Photography and Science/Public Sector industries with this part. The company claims these to be their most powerful notebooks ever. Depending on your application and needs you can configure the W700 from the options available in the W700 company datasheet

The most interesting part about the W700 is its digitizer pen pad that forms part of the palm rest. However, it's on the right hand side of the chassis, bane for lefties. It doubles up as the palm-rest.

The W500 is its cost-effective variant, it retains the Lenovo exclusive innovations albeit the digitizer, the hardware is nearly as powerful if not exactly. Available options are described in its datasheet.

For more details about the Thinkpad W-series, please visit the product page.

I was interested in a mac once since I wanted to try something other then windows, and while messing around with the web configuration tool I just decided to add in a bunch of stuff there was no way I'd use. Back when 2gb of ram was a lot I spec'd this thing at 16gb of ram, 4x1TB hard drives, some work station graphics card, and a bunch of stuff that I don't remember atm. Final price was somewhere in the neighborhood of $25k The ultimate conclusion with normal specs though was that macs were overpriced PC's